SEAL Of My Heart (16 page)

“Look, can I explain it all later. I have a favor to ask. Are you working today?”

“Was going to go in at three. Why, you need something?”

“Oh, was hoping I could bum a ride. Can you pick me up?”

“Where are you?”

“The Park’n Ride by the Fairgrounds. I could call a taxi if it’s a big imposition—”

“Don’t be silly, Kate. I’ll be right there.” Sheila hung up.

Kate sat on a cold bench in the shadow of the concrete freeway overpass. Wind whipped around her ankles and up the back of her neck. She zipped her jacket and flipped up her collar. Her thoughts became melancholy even though there was excitement in her belly at the thought that Tyler would come to see her.

Recalling the days before she left for Portland, which now seemed like a decade ago, she was glad they’d left her car at her cottage rather than over at Randy’s. In fact, Randy hadn’t been available the night before she left, so he’d picked her up that morning to take her to San Francisco. It would have been awkward if she’d needed to go over to his apartment to get her car.

She got out her cell to see if she’d missed a call from Tyler. It was a blank, black screen. She knew he’d be busy, especially since he was getting off a little early to catch the Friday flight. She texted him to let him know she’d landed. Then she did the same to Gretchen. Gretchen had answered with a
Good luck.
She was certainly going to need that.

Sheila drove up in a new Volvo just as Kate was putting her cell back in her purse. She wheeled her weekend bag over to the back as her friend popped the hatch.

“Wow, Sheila. You musta got a raise. Beautiful car.”

“New to me. Leased.”

“A big step up from your crusty old Volvo. The one with breast cancer around the headlights.” Kate belted in.

“Well don’t you look like the cat that ate the canary?” Sheila said, winking. She’d put a bright red rinse in her hair. Her tank top was skimpy, showing off her pierced belly button, but her jeans were slightly baggy with rolled up cuffs lined in pink flannel that matched the pink shoelaces on her black lace-up boots with paisley designs on them. Kate didn’t think she’d be going to work that way, but then Sheila was known as being a rather free spirit.

“Your hair’s different,” Kate remarked.

“Time for a change.”

On their way to Kate’s place, Sheila pumped her for details. Kate attempted to keep Tyler’s name out of it, but somehow got caught up in the barbed wire of Sheila’s clawing interrogation.

“Tyler? I used to know a guy named Tyler. He was just my type too. Loved to screw all day and all night.”

Kate blushed. She could have been describing her Tyler.

“He didn’t live in Portland,” Sheila said.

“My Tyler’s from San Diego. He’s a SEAL.”

Sheila’s head whipped around nervously, then she recovered her composure. “Nope. Definitely not the same guy. A SEAL, huh? All I can say is that he must be pretty incredible if you’d toss Randy off the boat for someone else. When do I get to meet him?”

“We’re working on it.”

“You gotta work this weekend, kiddo. We got some big parties coming in. I’m working too. No time off, I’m afraid.”

“I know.” The comment didn’t sit well with Kate, but she didn’t reply. She watched the tree-lined streets along the route home. The salt and peppering of manicured as well as unkempt homes in the neighborhood she lived in. The large Victorian in front of her cottage was painted light moss green with green trim. Her cottage, nestled behind the main house under a fruitless mulberry tree, was yellow. Sheila parked on the street and set the brake.

It was the first time Kate noticed Sheila had gotten a tattoo on her right shoulder. The cluster of burgundy grapes surrounded a red heart with the words
Wine Lover
scripted inside. She turned and Kate also saw Sheila was wearing heavier eye makeup than she was used to seeing. Sheila’s glance through half-lidded eyes was mischievous.

She leaned toward Kate, flattening back the collar of Kate’s fuzzy jacket, patting it at her shoulder. “When are you going to talk to him?”

“Tyler?”

“I love that name,” she whispered. Her eyebrows jiggled up and down and her speech was syrupy sweet, but well controlled. In a low sexy growl, Sheila said, “Randy. I was wondering about Randy. Or were you going to avoid him altogether?”

The smirk after her statement seemed condescending to Kate.

“I suppose I’ll see him tomorrow. They already had me on the schedule, but when I looked online yesterday, they’d booked me for tomorrow and all through the weekend.”

“That’s because I agreed to do the night inventory, Kate. I figured you didn’t want to spend your first day back in a dark, dusty wine cave with Randy. I got your back.” Sheila winked.

Kate was grateful she had been spared that trial. “Thank you, Sheila.”

“De nada.”

Kate rolled her weekend bag down the short driveway, past her SUV convertible to her front door. Sheila waved through the clean windshield of her Volvo and was off. Before, it would have been a grinding of gears and a cloud of smoke. Kate was happy for Sheila’s new car.

Glad to be home at last in her own space, she unpacked. The cottage was perfect for her. Built originally as a wine storage building, the thick walls were cozy and warm in the cool months, and on a day like today when it was hotter than usual, kept the little place cool. She’d left just one window ajar to take the edge off any stuffiness.

First thing she did was put on some satellite music and shed her clothes, heading for the shower just as some sad viola music began. She could barely hear it over the spray of the fresh water as it sluiced over her body and successfully triggered her reset button. With her hair washed and fresh makeup applied, her dirty clothes tossed into the stacking washer-dryer, she poured herself a tall glass of ice water and gulped it like it was the last on earth. Mail had been placed on the dining table, which she thought was odd, since it normally fell all over the floor through the slot. It meant someone had been inside her place, and then she remembered Randy had a key. Today was payday, so she decided to go up to the winery and check her box, go to the bank, and get everything ready for the rest of the week. She’d get her key from Randy, too.

After checking her face in the mirror over the sink, she grabbed her keys, locked the front door and headed for her car.

No one appeared to be home in the big green house when she drove out. She barely saw the couple who lived there only part time since they lived in San Francisco and used this place as a weekend getaway. In fact, it seemed like she hadn’t seen them in weeks. They liked to go on long overseas travels, so she figured that’s where they had gone. She actually knew their gardener, Jose, better than she knew them.

The ride to the winery was beautiful, winding through vineyards bright green with new growth. There weren’t many tourists since it was a Monday. Come Friday and all through the weekend, strangers with expensive cameras, sports cars and purses, wearing sweaters tied across their shoulders, shaded by floppy straw hats and winery baseball caps, would casually stroll down the sidewalks and shops of Healdsburg. In their attempts to look local they looked anything but. Their dollars, however, helped keep the town alive, and that was a good thing, especially for a family-owned winery concern. The Hellers were good at entertaining tourists, making them feel they, too, were part of the wine industry family. In a life that seemed distant now, Kate remembered she’d been the top seller of wine club memberships, adding to her already sizeable bonus from telephone wine sales.

She never thought of herself as especially good at selling, but in this arena, when all you had to do was be decent to people and tell them the truth, she excelled. Now she was going to have to do the sell job of her life.

Except it didn’t matter if they let her go. So why was she so nervous? And then it hit her. She was more worried about how things would be if they kept her on.

‡

T
yler had agreed
to give three newer Team guys a tour of the community grounds and some of their haunts downtown. He’d also agreed to take them to Timmons’s office, where the man was packing up his things, preparing for retirement. His replacement had been posted a month ago, so Timmons had very little to do. After twenty years in the Navy, most people figured he’d be happy to take off the last few days.

But they were wrong. It would have taken Timmons another week to extricate from his office. All the walls were covered in framed pictures and news clippings with some memos attached with yellowing tape. Cloth campaign swags and foreign flags were tacked to the ceiling or screwed into the plaster walls. A tiny Polaroid picture of Saddam Hussein in handcuffs, looking rather scruffy and unkempt, was nearly buried under an Arabic banner with his picture on it. These things chronicled several of the large and small missions SEAL Team 3 had been on. He had Kyle Lansdowne’s graduating class from BUD/S, all ten of them. Three were still serving, and all on his SEAL Team 3.

The new guys, T.J. Talbot, Frank Benson and Ollie Culbertson were fresh out of the Army long course Corps School at Ft. Bragg. They looked like freaked-out baby goats darting into each other, trying to help the Chief and to understand his instructions. Timmons was not very clear, and they weren’t listening much, so it was a giant clusterfuck. Tyler knew how they all felt. Everyone was nervous about the next phase of their deployment: Timmons to a loveless marriage and a wife obsessed with her doll collection, and the new guys to their first encounter with Dr. Death. Though the goals were vastly different, all four of them were distracted as hell.

“So Chief, you want to toss any of this, or are we packing it all up?” he asked Timmons.

“Son, that’s what garages are for. My wife’s informed me that will be where I offload all this shit and where I get to store it, since none of it will ever find its way into our house.” He’d been emptying a drawer one pencil at a time, checking the length of the pencils and condition of the erasers to see if they were worth keeping. Tyler watched the others try to look busy.

“That’s a shame, sir,” Ollie said stiffly.

“Oh hell,” Timmons said as he straightened and dumped all the pencils into a garbage can, “I’d rather be in my man cave in the garage anyway. At least I don’t have to sit on plastic, and I don’t have to worry about farting or getting crumbs on the floor.”

The new guys chuckled and gave Tyler the checkout look to be sure it was okay to laugh at the Chief. For just about everyone else, retiring would be heaven and the Navy was hell, but to Timmons it was the other way around. Tyler hoped he’d be able to survive his years away from the base.

The new guys had been trained in the way all the SEALs were. They shut up and just did their jobs. There would be time enough for play, but right now after the initial awkwardness of packing away Timmons’s life like he was dead and everything was being shipped to Goodwill, the men settled down and took turns doing different things. T.J., the tallest, was pulling things from the wall and upper bookshelves, while Ollie taped together the bottoms of new boxes from a local office supply store. Frankie and Tyler wrapped the glass-framed items in bubble wrap and taped them securely with packing tape. Tyler kept a close eye on the nearly two-foot statue of a frog with a surfboard, the sixth such statue Timmons’s Team boys had bought or replaced for him.

Tyler grabbed the piece. “Timmons, I’m getting nervous watching this thing wobble every time you walk past that file drawer. You mind if I take care of him first?”

“Go ahead. Put him on top after you wrap him.” Timmons pointed to a half-filled box. Tyler could already tell there was no way the statue would fit.

“Sir, I’m going to put this in your car. Toss me your keys,” Tyler said to his Chief. Timmons grumbled something under his breath and did as requested. Ollie came along, carrying a full box taped shut which Timmons had labeled “Stuff.”

“Poor dumb shit,” Ollie started, then darted a quick glance at Tyler in alarm. “Sorry, Ty.”

“No worries, Oliver.”

“That’s Ollie, sir. My real name’s worse than that, so I like Ollie, if you don’t mind.”

“Someone play a practical joke when you were born, Ollie?”

“Something like that. I think they took one look at me with my big ears and said, ‘Nope, doesn’t belong in this family.’ I was adopted.”

“You and T.J. have that in common, it seems.”

“Nah, he was never adopted. Foster care the whole way. Tough way to work it. But made him the man he is.”

They placed the box in Timmons’ truck, but laid the frog statue on the passenger seat.

“What about Moore?”

“Pretty much Ivy League. Great family. He’s a real gentleman. Got himself a real nice girl who gets him kind of confused, if you know what I mean.”

“I get your drift.” Tyler knew exactly what that felt like. He hoped this weekend would cure some of his trouble concentrating.

They continued filling and carrying out boxes until Timmons’s car was filled to capacity. Then they moved on to T.J’s. pickup, first filling the back and then stuffing the king cab seat full. Tyler couldn’t believe all this stuff had actually fit in the Chief’s office.